The value of code reviews - Why some bottlenecks are healthy
With increased adoption of AI, there is often an argument that code-reviews are now the new bottleneck. And I agree with this completely. Code-Reviews, especially the review you do yourself after AI has written your code, take time. But I would object to the notion that this is a bad thing. What is a bottleneck? A bottleneck is something that slows down the process. It becomes a point where work must get in a line, to pass through a narrow space. With the speed of AI producing code, code reviews become a bottleneck. But is having a bottleneck in the process always a bad thing? The value of slowing down I can only speak from my personal experience of developing software for roughly 7 years now. But in my experience, slowing down is not always bad. On the contrary, it can be very healthy. When you slow down, and take the time to really think about things, you often come up with insights that you would not have if you always rush through things. And these insights can be golden opportunities to change something for the better. Be that a subtle bug discovered, be that a design flaw addressed or something else - the list is long. But as British computer scientist Tony Hoare famously said: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." But simplicity is hard "I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." If it was Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal who said it is beside the point. The point is, there is a lot of truth in this quote. A writer of prose I know also confirmed what many senior software engineers know - to make something complex simple and easily comprehensible takes way more time and effort in the form of careful thought than it takes to leave it being complicated and hard to understand. AI is good at writing code quickly, yes. But is it also good at writing code which has high q